Terminator 2: Judgment Day

Terminator 2: Judgment Day, also known as T2, is a 1991 film about a shape-shifting cyborg who is sent back from the future to assassinate John Connor before he can grow up to lead the resistance, while a protector cyborg is also sent. It is the sequel to the 1984 film The Terminator.

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Three billion human lives ended on August 29, 1997. The survivors of the nuclear fire called the war Judgment Day. They lived only to face a new nightmare: the war against the Machines. The computer which controlled the machines, Skynet, sent two Terminators back through time. Their mission: to destroy the leader of the human Resistance, John Connor, my son. The first Terminator was programmed to strike at me, in the year 1984, before John was born. It failed. The second was sent to strike at John himself, when he was still a child. As before, the Resistance was able to send a lone warrior, a protector for John. It was just a question of which one of them would reach him first.

Watching John with the machine, it was suddenly so clear. The Terminator would never stop. It would never leave him. It would never hurt him, never shout at him, or get drunk and hit him, or say it was too busy to spend time with him. It would always be there. And it would die to protect him. Of all the would-be fathers who came and went over the years, this thing, this machine was the only one that measured up. In an insane world, it was the sanest choice.

[alternate epilogue] August 29, 1997, came and went. Nothing much happened. Michael Jackson turned 40. There was no Judgment Day. People went to work as they always do. Laughed, complained, watched TV, made love. I wanted to run to through the street yelling to grab them all and say, "Every day from this day on is a gift. Use it well." Instead, I got drunk. That was 30 years ago. But the dark future which never came still exists for me. And it always will, like the traces of a dream. John fights the war differently than it was foretold. Here, on the battlefield of the Senate, his weapons were common sense and hope. The luxury of hope was given me by the Terminator. Because if a machine can learn the value of human life, maybe we can too.

[epilogue] The unknown future rolls toward us. I face it for the first time with a sense of hope, because if a machine, a Terminator, can learn the value of human life, maybe we can too.

John: Now don't take this the wrong way, but you are a Terminator, right?

Terminator: Yes. Cyberdyne Systems Model 101.

John: [pokes at one of Terminator's bullet wounds] Holy shit! You're really real! I mean, you're like a machine underneath, right? But sort of alive outside?

Terminator: I'm a cybernetic organism. Living tissue over a metal endoskeleton.

John: This is intense. Get a grip, John. Okay, um, you're not here to kill me. I figured that part out for myself. So what's the deal?

Terminator: My mission is to protect you.

John: Yeah? Who sent you?

Terminator: You did. Thirty-five years from now, you reprogrammed me to be your protector here, in this time.

John: Oh, this is deep.

[John and the Terminator are riding on a motorcycle at night]

John: So this other guy? He's a Terminator like you, right?

Terminator: Not like me. A T-1000. Advanced prototype.

John: You mean more advanced than you are?

Terminator: Yes. A mimetic polyalloy.

John: What the hell does that mean?

Terminator: Liquid metal.

John: Where are we going?

Terminator: We have to get out of the city immediately. And avoid the authorities.

John: Listen, I gotta stop at my house first. I wanna pick up some stuff.

Terminator: Negative. The T-1000 will definitely try to reacquire you there.

John: You sure?

Terminator: I would.

[John and the Terminator arrive at Pescadero State Hospital but a security guard is at the gate]

Terminator: Why do we stop now?

John: Now, you gotta promise me you're not gonna kill anyone, right?

Terminator: Right.

John: Swear?

Terminator: What?

John: Just put up your hand and say, 'I swear I won't kill anyone.'

Terminator: [raises hand] I swear I will not kill anyone.

John: Alright, let's go.

[they arrive at the gate where the guard stops them]

Guard: Visiting hours is ten to four Monday through Friday.

[Terminator stands up, pulls out his gun and shoots the guard's knees, and guard screams in pain]

John: WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?!?!

Guard: You son of a bitch, you shot me, you crazy bastard.

[Terminator breaks glass, opens the gate, grabs gun clips then goes back to the bike with John]

Terminator: He'll live.

[the Terminator and the Connors drive off]

Terminator: The man directly responsible is Miles Bennett Dyson. In a few months, he will create a revolutionary type of microprocessor.

Sarah Connor: Go on. Then what?

Terminator: In three years, Cyberdyne will become the largest supplier of military computer systems. All stealth bombers are upgraded with Cyberdyne computers, becoming fully unmanned. Afterwards, they fly with a perfect operational record. The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes online on August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware 2:14 AM, Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.

Sarah: Skynet fights back.

Terminator: Yes. It launches its missiles against their targets in Russia.

John Connor: Why attack Russia? Aren't they our friends now?

Terminator: Because Skynet knows that the Russian counterattack will eliminate its enemies over here.

Sarah: Jesus.

John: I wish I could have met my real dad.

Terminator: You will.

John: Yeah, I guess. When I'm like, 45. They sent him back through time to 1984. Man. He hadn't even been born yet. It messes with your head. Mom and him were only together for, like, one night, but she still loves him, I guess. I see her crying sometimes. She denies it totally of course, like she got something stuck in her eye.

Terminator: [pause] Why do you cry?

John: You mean people?

Terminator: Yes.

John: I don't know. We just cry. You know. When it hurts.

Terminator: Pain causes it?

John: Uh-unh, no, it's different... It's when there's nothing wrong with you but you hurt anyways. You get it?

Terminator: No.

[John and the Terminator have stopped Sarah killing Miles Dyson]

Sarah: [voiceover] Dyson listened while the Terminator laid it all down. Skynet, Judgment Day, the history of things to come. It's not every day that you find out you're responsible for three billion deaths. He took it pretty well.

Miles Dyson: [after the Terminator completes his story] I feel like I'm gonna throw up. You're judging me on things I haven't even done yet. How are we supposed to know?

Sarah: Yeah. Right. How are you supposed to know? Fucking men like you built the hydrogen bomb. Men like you thought it up. You think you're so creative. You don't know what it's like to really create something, to create a life, feel it growing inside you. All you know how to create is death and destruction...

John: Mom! We need to be a little more constructive here, OK? We still have to stop this from happening, don't we?

Tarissa Dyson: But I thought... Aren't we changing things, I mean right now, changing the way it goes?

Terminator: [grins] Trust me. [uses a minigun on the police force, destroying vehicles and scaring off the police without causing a single casualty]

[After the T-1000 falls into the molten steel vat]

John: Is it dead?

Terminator: Terminated.

John: [brings out the robot arm] Will this melt in there?

Terminator: Yes. Throw it in.

John: Adios. [throws the arm into the molten steel vat]

Terminator: And the chip. [John throws chip into the molten steel vat]

Sarah: [relieved] It's over.

Terminator: No. There is one more chip. [points to his head] And it must be destroyed also. [hands Sarah the controller for the winch] Here. I cannot self-terminate. You must lower me into the steel.

John: No. No!

Terminator: I'm sorry, John. I'm sorry.

John: No! It'll be okay! Stay with us! It'll be okay!

Terminator: I have to go away.

John: No! Don't do it, please! Don't go!

Terminator: I must go away, John.

John: No! No, wait! Wait, you don't have to do this!

Terminator: [gets chain] I'm sorry.

John: No, don't do it! Don't go!

Terminator: It has to end here.

John: I order you not to go. I order you not to go! [breaks down] I order you not to!!!

Terminator: I know now why you cry, [touches John's face with finger] but it's something I can never do. [hugs John, turns to face Sarah, who shakes his hand; the Terminator then grabs the steel and holds onto it] Goodbye. [lowered by Sarah into vat, but flashes John and Sarah a thumbs-up before he completely disappears]

"The whole liquid metal guy was actually part of the original story. The whole first film was really the first act and a half of my original conception of the story. And the second film, although greatly elaborated, was the second half of the original story. Quite frankly starting with a shoe string budget and state of the art effects of the time, I couldn't figure out how to do it. So eventually we said we're just gonna have to streamline this and simplify it, and I wrote a more tore, linear, simple version of it. I thought of it as kind of a down and dirty cheap-o version of the story. And so then when it came time to do Terminator 2 (...) I said we gotta do 'this' story, and they said you do whatever story you want. It was nice, they didn't have a story, they didn't care, they said 'look, you came up with this stuff, you just figure it out'"

During Terminator 2 we had another software problem that was solved by another guy from Alias, an Engineer named Angus Poon, who came down to ILM and wrote a program that we called “SOCK” that was responsible for maintaining C2 continuity across these 4-sided, B-Spline patches. My partner in crime then, Mark Dippé, knew the higher level of math that was required and he wrote a lot of good tools.

For T2 we were using a version of UV mapping. We used coded and texture-based shaders for Renderman. Everything had to be scripted out into RIB files to go off to Renderman.

When you were animating multiple channels of control vertices, you ended up having multiple pivot points in space. This inhibited control when choosing to "group" vertices with existing animation data into a new hierarchy. ChanMath would collapse all the control vertices to 0,0,0. I personally would use this all the time when animating the "death sequence" (the end lava scene) in T2.

There was no rigging or anything like that. You had hierarchies of B-Spline patches on a rudimentary forward kinematic system. It was very crude but it did the job and it allowed me to figure out a way to build the T1000. We didn’t have the ability to project a curve onto a surface, we were stuck in B-Splines. B-Splines allowed for an easier way to shape surface patches. We also had a version of Steven Coon’s patching system. This was way before NURBS and Subdivision Surfaces wasn’t even on the radar. We didn’t have access to things like Mudbox or any of these tools to sculpt and bring up detail. We did have source code to Renderman because we had a good relationship with Pixar.